Representation in political institutions, including the judiciary, is an important consideration for both political scientists and citizens. What factors systematically influence diversity among judges? In particular, does the method of selection affect the relative success of political minorities in attaining a seat on the bench? The answers to these questions have substantial normative and theoretical implications. We examine judges on all state supreme and intermediate appellate courts in 1985 and 1999 to assess the influence of various structural, political, and demographic factors on judicial diversity. We demonstrate that the ability of political minorities to attain a place in the judiciary is not solely a function of any single factor. Instead, their success is influenced by a multifaceted combination of factors contingent on time and the level of the court, and these influences differ for women and for minorities.

In contrast to research on congressional and state legislative elections, strategic entry into gubernatorial contests has been largely unexplored. We examine the influence of incumbency, gubernatorial popularity, and other factors on candidate strategic decisions and the resulting level of competition in nonincumbent-party gubernatorial primaries between 1974 and 2000. We find that incumbency and gubernatorial popularity interact in their effect, with popular incumbents discouraging competition and unpopular incumbents encouraging it. The size of the potential candidate pool, the condition of the state economy, state partisanship, and state party endorsement practices also influence competition.

There is tremendous nonrandom variation from state to state in the rates at which people overreport voting in the Current Population Surveys (CPS). What accounts for this state-level bias in overreporting? We find that the determinants of statewide rates of overreporting parallel those in our earlier findings on individual-level overreporting: overreporting is a function of higher concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, higher rates of religious membership, and being in the Deep South. These relationships are remarkably stable over time (1980-2000), and they are unaltered by improvements in how we measure overreporting. We suggest a method for deflating reported statewide registration figures to account for this bias, assuming that these registration figures are inflated in the same way as are statewide voting figures. We replicate and extend a part of Brown, Jackson, and Wright's (1999) analysis using these deflated figures, showing that our approach can improve explanation.

The American state legislatures provide a unique opportunity for the study of lawmaking. This essay describes and analyzes state legislative research since 1990 and offers suggestions for future research. The discipline made significant gains during this period, expanding our knowledge on a wide variety of important topics and concerns. Despite these gains, many gaps in our knowledge remain unfilled and many questions remain unanswered. The field has been particularly weak in building theory. Scholars need to make a more concerted effort to develop our theoretical understanding of state legislatures for the field to develop greater direction and coherence.

We use a survey of State House reporters to measure corruption in state government and assess the priority federal prosecutors place on corruption investigations. The reliability and validity of the corruption measures are assessed, as are the relationships among corruption level, federal prosecutorial effort, and the number of federal prosecutions. Federal corruption prosecutions are positively correlated with both corruption and prosecutorial effort. Hence, we argue that federal prosecution data provide a potentially biased and unreliable measure of state public corruption.